Collective Soul

Conley WoodsWednesday, November 14, 2012

ll right, so I stole a band name for the title this week, but how can you pass that up for a deck that contains both Lingering Souls and Collective Blessing? Alas, I am getting ahead of myself.

For the past few months, Standard has been in a constant state of growth, hammering out what it will look like for the foreseeable future. Recently, it seems like the metagame has stiffened a bit, with the best decks seeing a lot more play than random brews, even though those random brews are still doing plenty of work. Today, we look at one of those brews, which was able to overcome much of a field filled with "the best decks" at the StarCityGames Open in Dallas this past weekend.

Matthew Long decided—given that White-Black Tokens has been such a good deck at various points over the past half dozen years and Green-White Tokens has also shared a similar trait—to combine them. With access to both black and green, the tokens-style deck can have a more robust late game as well as access to both Vault of the Archangel and Gavony Township. Now, it does mean that some of the traditional things you see in tokens decks would not be needed, like Intangible Virtue, but it also means more of the deck provides live topdecks at any point in time.